What with all this drinking and frolicking and last-minute cramming, do they actually get any studying done?

I must be getting old. I know I sound like a sour old man, but this wasn't what my college experience was like.

A young lady that we know (she babysits and house-sits for us) goes to Kent State, and she's a Facebook buddy with my wife. She's a fairly successful student in what should be a pretty challenging major, and from her Facebook wall, it appears as though every weekend is a big beer party.

As an employer, I really don't know where the next generation of competent engineers is going to come from. They all think they're Bluto from Animal House.

It was, I think, the only sociology class I took, sociology and crime or something like that. The adjunct teaching it was an obvious Marxist, and among his many claims, one of the most patently absurd was that employers killed far more people than so-called "violent criminals" did every year. A quick check of BLS and FBI statistics verified my instinct and I called him out on this.

To his credit, he said he would check the numbers and at the next class, admitted he made a mistake.

Given how uncharitable Ms. Althouse was towards Shirley Sherrod and Ann's desire to be controversial, is it that far off when she will be asking us to be sympathetic towards her after being called out by her students?

How many of us will be as exacting towards her as she was towards Ms. Sherrod?

Ann, given your high standards towards others I would carefully measure my words if I was you. I suspect your post about Ms. Sherrod will be thrown back at you.

"is it that far off when she will be asking us to be sympathetic towards her after being called out by her students?"

You think I'd come whining on my blog if a student told me I was wrong? I challenge you to find a post out of my 20,000+ posts where I complained about anything that one of my students did. If you can find one -- and I don't thing there's even one -- I'm certain it's not me complaining that a student "called me out" for being wrong. Nor would I have any reason to complain if that ever happened. If I'm wrong and a student catches me, I say good catch and try to make something good out of it. If I think I'm not wrong, I discuss it with the class or something like that. It's not even a problem. It's a perfectly good thing. I want students to argue with me in class. Not arguing would be a problem!

Huh? I did that just about every day when I was in college. Whats the big deal?

Oh yah, I forgot how totalitarian most campuses have become. Telling the PoliSci prof that no, Sen Byrd wont take the floor against Clinton during Impeachment ("for the sake of honor", he predicted) would have got me 3 months of sensitivity training.

A fun list put together I suspect by some bright students, but I don't know that I would focus on the use of "calling out for being wrong," which feeds into our argument culture that seems to demonize those we disagree with and features friction more than illumination. Why not call for a dialog with professors as well as other students to get them reexamine their assumptions-- that is what is suppose to happen in class as far as I am concerned.